The Green Letters form a running account of the many political and environmental activities of Atlantis Eco-Community in Colombia. All previous Green Letters are available at: www.afan.org.uk
"Compassion for the suffering of others is not weakness. Acting from compassion when those around you do not takes more courage and strength of character than going along with everyone else's cruelty." - Norm Phelps, quoted in 'New Leaves', magazine of the Movement for Compassionate Living
Although passionately concerned with war and injustice wherever it occurs, we want to begin this Green Letter with a reminder that the most horrific slaughter the human race is engaged in on a daily basis is not in Iraq or Darfur, but all around us, under our noses, a massive slaughter that rarely touches our consciousness....
"I remember well the first time I stopped eating meat. It was in Birmingham in 1976. I had a job with a builder repairing some walls in a slaughter house. I spent about two days there ..
"The first thing I noticed was the fear in the animals' eyes. Those poor creatures, sheep, pigs and cattle knew they were in a death house and could see what was happening to those animals in the front of the queue. They all cowered in corners whenever the main slaughterman appeared with his long knives hanging from his belt. He laughed and joked about them as he selected the ones to be killed.
"I remember seeing one sheep which would not go quietly and watched as this devil grabbed it by the legs and threw it over the fence into the killing area. The poor animal must have had its legs broken. I watched in horror as he pressed the bolt gun against shivering cows and dispatched them. They fell with a heavy thud to the ground. It was awful seeing the life go out of these harmless, innocent animals.
"Pigs were supposedly stunned and then thrown into a vat of boiling water to have the hair scalded off. I could see that not all of them were properly stunned and they must have suffered horribly. All the while, pop music was blasting out from the speakers around the place as the workers cut up the newly dead animals. As soon as they fell, cows were strung up with chains around their hind legs and they moved along to the first knifeman. He would slash down their fronts and drag out the stomachs and all the intestines. All the messy guts were put into containers on wheels and hauled away. Nothing was wasted.
"Next a man with a chainsaw would cut off the heads. Were all the animals dead
while this was happening? I hoped so. At the other end of the line, the
carcasses were cut up into manageable pieces and then plastic-wrapped ready for
the supermarket shelves. Some of the men offered me offcuts. I wanted to
vomit."
Borne by the wholeness of Nature, Woven into the web of life, We are kin to all that lives. And what we call Wilderness Is the ancient home, Where our own cradle stood. But the endless wilderness Of late is broken, Torn to islets against whose shores Relentlessly the breakers Of all consuming humanity beat. While the web of life and wilderness fade, We dare set limits of what may remain. Yet deep in our souls we feel with pain The wrong we do to Earth and life, And that the beating breakers Our own beings break. Wilderness wakens in unsung brave hearts, Kind hands of old and young firmly join To shield our wild siblings and Mother Earth, To protect ourselves from ourselves.
In Colombia, our work with the endangered peasant 'Peace Communities' and their 'Universities of Resistance' continues and deepens. We begin with a synopsis from Anne to clarify exactly what this movement is about:
"We are creating a 'Universidad de Resistencia' amongst ethnic (S. American 'Indian'), black and peasant communities from all over Colombia. The word 'University' conjures up something very formal but our University has no walls, offices, salaries, diplomas or fees. All courses take place in remote communities which are under constant attack from all sides in the armed conflict and all the 'students' are community leaders committed to pacifist resistance and whose people have rejected the presence of any armed soldiers, paramilitaries or guerrilla in their territories.
"This has led to many massacres and revenge killings of the peasant leaders, yet these communities are determined to continue in spite of the high price exacted for refusing to take part in the war.
"Without funding from anyone, we have managed to hold the first month-long course in the Peace Community of San Jose de Apartado, Antioquia, in August 2004, attended by 30 leaders from eight communities from all corners of the country. The 'subjects' were food self-sufficiency and organic agriculture, compost making, natural pesticides, healthy cooking, and the philosophical aspects of resistance. There was also plenty of theatre, music and alcohol-free fun. It was a resounding success and the leaders who attended have now taught gardening and compost-making in their home communities.
"One of the reasons we were able to run such a course in the midst of the ever-worsening war is that we were constantly accompanied by volunteers from the Peace Brigades International and the Fellowship of Reconciliation.
"We have planned four courses in different parts of the country for the year 2005 covering, in addition to food production and the legal and philosophical aspects of the Resistance:
1. Education: as state education in Colombia bears little or no relevance to country people and their lives and goals, this course will be about evolving a new kind of education.
2. Health: Due to the ever-worsening civil war here, vast sections of Colombian country people now have no access to drugs - the Army and paramilitary forces won't let people take medicines to their communities as they say they are for the guerrilla army. (This is actually a means of pressuring people to leave their homelands and migrate to join the misery belts of refugees growing daily around the cities so that their land is up for grabs by the big landowners.) This course will teach people how to use natural remedies where possible, plus basic first aid techniques and midwifery.
These courses will be repeated in each of the far-flung communities to prevent centralization and to encourage and support people whose daily lives take place in the midst of a civil war raging around them.
"We can't solve the problems we have today by thinking the way we did when we
created them."
Albert Einstein
Reporting from the latest of these peasant 'university' gatherings in San Jose, which lasted four days, Anne writes:
I got here very late last night after 23 hours on buses - there were many landslides on the main roads necessitating detours. At the night stop before the final leg of the journey to La Union, the country area where the course was to be held, I found myself sharing a room with a young woman and her lovely little one-year-old girl. The young woman was behaving somewhat strangely, didn't want to talk to me and was hiding behind her hair. I pushed myself to ask questions and it turned out she was on the run, having been lifted by the army last year, accused of being a guerrillera. She was forced to lie about her community, saying there were guerrilla-collaborators, by being beaten up by the army and threatened that they would take her baby away. Then they sent her to what the Government likes to call their 'Reinsertion' programme for ex-guerrilleros, which is actually just a house full of other girls, with no food supplied, so she got work selling trivia at traffic lights, stayed at it for six months, then bolted.
She is the cousin of the man whose family had been destroyed by that hand grenade in August (see last 2 Green Letters). He was there and very cool with her, as obviously she did betray her people. However, she had later retracted all she had been forced to say and made public declarations that she'd been under duress. I thought 'good for her' for making a run for it and sort of took her under my wing.
The next day as we were passing through the checkpoint between Apartado and San Jose, which is where the soldiers and paras are most aggressive and where many locals have been murdered, they started asking for identity cards. I could see she was ready to bolt for the forest as she was shaking and sweating, so I said loudly in front of the soldiers that her baby was looking poorly from all that darrhoea she'd been having, and said 'let's go and find a loo.' So we did, thus avoiding the ID check as we waited in the door of a nearby campesino house till the passengers were getting back into the jeeps. Later I heard her family have accepted her back and the community is getting her legal help.
One day, I walked into a fierce argument between one of the nuns and a big black Chocoano man. She was nearly in tears of rage about his accusation that San Jose is too radical and gave him a list of times when the bishop has not supported them and how he fondly calls the paramilitary chiefs his 'muchachitos' ('my little lads') and preaches forgiveness of their hideous crimes. In the end the big black man conceded that the bishop was making a big mistake.
I am crying just thinking about the power of this simple ceremony spent amongst a hundred brave people who have lost hundreds more of their friends and families, often in the most awful circumstances imaginable. Many of the local San Jose people I had known as happy, pushy, determined people began to list members of their families. One young lad of about 18, very shy but a good leader-to-be, had had his mother, father and sisters killed in front of him. Another told of how when he was 13, on a country path, his two uncles were shot in front of him, and he was beaten up by the Army. He told me later that his nightmares never stop.
The worst story of all was told by a man from Catatumbo near the Venezuelan border who told of two of his friends, leaders in their community, buried alive by the paramilitaries and how people were forced to stand and watch while the paras threw earth over them and laughed as they watched them wriggle and the earth move as they struggled before suffocating.
How can any of this be cured? I don't even want to believe that it is possible that human-beings could act like this. I talked of our boys of course, and also began to try and talk about how I felt on hearing what other people have gone through and lost and how much I respect their attitudes to keep fighting and not give up, but I could hardly speak for crying.
Afterwards lots of people came and sat around me and hugged me. It was really the first time that I have just felt upset, rather than mainly angry and guilty about our boys being killed. I couldn't stop crying silently for hours amongst the people, everyone just let me, no-one tried to stop me.
In spite of many condemnations of the State and their responsibility for the massacres, the complicity of the Army, and the killing of witnesses, the government has done nothing about this festering evil at all, and the area is more narco than ever, full of coca fields and a private narco airstrip that the Army pretend they don't see. The small group of people fighting for justice also has to combat the attitudes of many neighbours who say 'forget it'. I have condensed what the girl told me a thousandfold and have not communicated a fraction of the horror of her story, the tortures and dismemberment of the victims. When she finished telling us all this during the first day when we were doing introductions, everyone in the group just wanted to go on to the next story. I objected, saying that one cannot listen to this kind of horror story and then just go on to the next one. One man, Juan, tried to push me to give up, saying we had no time. I said, tough luck, we'll make time, the others finally agreed with me, so I got each person to give the girl their reactions. She herself is a little dolly bird and not reactive emotionally, but others talked of their anger at nothing ever being done about anything and feeling overwhelmed by so many horror stories and not knowing what to do. Even Juan, after he got over his huff, talked very humanly about his fears and the impossibility of listening and taking it all in. It is understandable that everyone is scared of getting lost and bogged down in the morass of such big and impossible feelings, and this is where we will be able to help therapeutically if they let us, which I think after a little resistance, they will.
A young girl from the National University then instantly offered to be the group 'secretary', making a resume of our experiences. She is a little brown mouse-like creature, but very confident for her age. She made a quick resume of all we had said, left out all the important points, communicated the rest in heady university language designed to make massacres sound like picnics and thus drained the strength and meaning of anything that had been said. I was at explosion point and with an encouraging glance from the priest, Javier, who had obviously noticed this, I got up and said that that was a bit quick and superficial and then I talked properly about Trujillo and also about how we handle therapy amongst ourselves in our community. Then I offered the floor to the girl to answer, but she didn't accept, but Juan got up and talked of the massacres of his fellow trade unionists and we rescued the disaster a bit. Afterwards, the girl kept out of my way. I was quite happy with this arrangement as I was furious with her, as that kind of heady cutoffness is very violent. Yet she is just a green kid who's been taught to talk like that. No-one else at the group did, as they have escaped the curse of education generally and the lawyers amongst them are too aware to behave like that. But there is still a huge problem with words and the downplaying of all that has happened to these folk and millions more like them.
We all stared at one another in shock and disgust. This was the man who heads the forces that have killed six members of just this one tiny group I was with that night. None of us knew what to say, until a young man finally broke the silence, saying that when his uncles were killed, he thought a lot about joining the guerrilla and getting revenge, but could see that in the long run, that would only bring more problems to his family, so he went to live in Medellin, but there he was called a guerrilla because he is from San Jose, and then his brother was killed, so he came back to work for peace within his community.
I cursed and swore and wished President Uribe and his hired killers the worst of bad luck. The 'mother' of this group, a beautiful Indian woman, whose first son was shot by the paras in one of the San Jose massacres, had turned to stone and couldn't utter a word. The next morning as I was leaving, she finally talked to me with tremendous passion and dignity and said that people had said to her when she had another baby after the murder of her eldest son, that that would replace the one killed, but that nothing could ever replace what they had taken from her, and she broke down crying. I sat with her and made her herb tea.
Thank you for reading this and editing it and sending it out to other people who
will read it and feel something of the immense depth of evil and lies that is
happening here in Colombia, against the most vulnerable of people. I think I
would die quickly of cancer if I had to keep it all inside me. None of this
ever comes out publicly in Colombia, where everyone is on serious overload
already and has no space for more horrors. I always knew the State media lie,
but never realized exactly to what degree.
Anne
Here are Anne's accounts of her latest two prison visits:
Sept. 26th 2004: On arrival, I was welcomed by an ELN (National Liberation Army) airplane hijacker! . Gerardo, whom I had come to visit, had to wait until I arrived before being brought in to the visiting patio in handcuffs. When the cuffs were taken off, he greeted me like a friendly dog that hasn't seen anyone for months. He brought a pillow slip full of all kinds of fruit and granola and milk that his cell mates had helped him get together when they knew I was coming. We put two blankets on a bit of grass and sat in the sun for a while.
The atmosphere was very nice, it was the first long visit - 6 hours instead of two - since the prisoners' strike to demand extra visiting time, so there were lots of wives, babies and kids, happy couples under piles of blankets and a general air of picnic. First of all, Gerardo wanted to know how the girls are, and during the morning several guerrilleros who have met both Katie and Laura and heard the CD came over to ask about them and about relationships within the community: it seems we have a commune extension in Patio 5 of Combita prison! Gerardo has no family at all and when he phones me, he always asks about everyone and I tell him bits and pieces of gossip, and he obviously tells the rest of his fellow prisoners. As we chatted, I noticed as I had with Irish Jim a long time ago, that all the men who have been moved to Combita from La Modelo look much better physically, as they live outside, the air is good and the food is plain and simple.
Several guerrilleros came to ask me about our farm in Icononzo that was taken from us by the murdering FARC commander who eventually ordered the 'execution' of our boys. I had talked to Gerardo about this and had asked him to see if any of the FARC commanders in the prison can send word to their superiors to say our land must be left alone.
One man, from a defunct guerrilla group said to a FARC man that the FARC are creating a counter revolution not a revolution, and the FARC man conceded, saying: Yes, yes, 'muchos errores' - we have made many mistakes, and looking really embarrassed. An ELN man (from the National Liberation Army - the second largest guerrilla group in Colombia) said I should take the title deeds of the farm to a bank, take out a loan, not pay it back, and let the bank take the land. A clever idea, but I don't think I could go through with it! I thanked him for trying to help.
The head of the FARC group in this prison will be phoning me to see what he can do about our lost land - that'll be something interesting for the telephone tappers in the State Attorney's office to listen to, they must be bored since Jim stopped ringing me. The prisoners told me about the strike they had held, which included demands regarding grievances such as bad food, the fact that rich narcos can get three long visits a week as the prison Director is a friend of theirs and they pay him well, whereas ordinary prisoners were getting just one short visit every two weeks; also that they are given 1 toilet roll and 1 bar of soap once every 6 months! And they want the prison director sacked because he is a narco paramilitary - the prison guards agree with the strikers and want him sacked too, as he humiliates them to please the narcos!
Second visit, November 21st:
All us women visitors spent two hours in extremely freezing early morning paramo temperatures with bare legs and short skirts - no long skirts, trousers or stockings allowed. The body searches are much more lax, so all our former complaining did help, but freezing to death is quite a good substitute torture. The searches are now so lax that I accidentally got in wearing my very cheap wristwatch which I gave to the fellows inside. On the way in, I heard a guard captain having a very rude fit on the phone at another guard about an order that was not being obeyed. I found out later that the guards inside were saying that the prisoners could not bring blankets to the visitors' patio - without which a visit would be unbearable, with the sudden extreme temperature changes and only concrete and steel everywhere to sit on - and the captain retorted that he had given the order that they could have as many blankets as they liked!
This time I asked to see two prisoners at once, Jose and Gerardo. While I was waiting for them to be brought in handcuffed, a prisoner and his wife came and offered me coffee. You get the warmish water from the guards who sell the men instant coffee powder at high prices. I was very grateful as I had turned an interesting shade of blue by then. The woman works for a rich family who said she couldn't come to visit her husband as she hadn't done all the ironing. She told them to get stuffed and came anyway.
Eventually, Jose and Gerardo appeared and we spread out the blankets they brought on the little patch of green and hoped the sun would come out, which it did, and it stayed out, so I got burnt as well as frozen; I was also well shaken up by the long bus journey. I could be mistaken for a masochist do-gooder if I didn't then tell you about the six hours of intense and fascinating conversation with Jose and Gerardo and another prisoner and his wife, interspersed by other people coming round and greeting us and often bringing me a piece of fruit, as they all know I don't eat meat.
Gerardo simply cuddled up to me and stayed like that the whole time and I mainly talked and listened to Jose and Edwin. Jose in is for 30 years for hijacking a plane and keeping the passengers and crew in the forest for two years, pending payment. This has never been proven, not that he really denies it either. But more interesting is his political mind. The difference between the ELN and the FARC shines out in the way he thinks and talks, and as we know to our cost, FARC men who think and talk seem to be on the brink of extinction.
He said that all the armed movements need to re-evaluate their attitude to revolution, that they should be armies for backing up the people, not for terrorizing them, and that arms are for defending ideas, not imposing them and that the notion well spread around by the State that the guerrilla have no ideals any more is fast becoming true. Both he and Gerardo talked with some bitterness about a FARC commander that had recently been transferred to another prison as he only caused problems and was a dictator. I met him once or twice, and he seemed a bit thick. Anyway, the prison director had him moved because he couldn't keep his patio under control and caused fights over stupid things, and they had to keep calling in Yesid, a higher, more intelligent commander, from solitary confinement to resolve the conflicts! Yesid is now in solitary in para-controlled La Dorada because he organized the recent strike . also from solitary!
Yesid was about to get out of jail as his sentence was up - for the third time: each time his release date comes up, they invent another set of charges against him. He would be really 'dangerous' to let out as he is intelligent and has such natural leadership qualities and charisma that he would make a big difference to the FARC and to the country. Some time after this visit, I was telling a woman lawyer friend about him and she told me this anecdote: that a friend of hers who works in the department of the State Prosecutor's office that is to do with prisoners' rights, rang the director of La Modelo prison to talk about a strike that was going on there. The underling who answered the phone said: Sorry, Madam, the Director is out, but Yesid is here, he can help you. So they passed the phone to Yesid, and she said, 'Hello, Vice-Director Yesid...'
Edwin told me horror stories of massacres in La Modelo caused by the paramilitaries, over 500 people killed in one year, but also horrible stories of the FARC joining in with the common criminals to extort other political prisoners and punish those who didn't pay. I do take their point of view with some salt as the FARC are the most successful guerrilla army of the lot and so they attract criticism just for that, also I remember Jim telling me that when the ELN are in charge of a patio, everything is nicer but less organized and therefore less safe, and another friend once told me that in areas controlled by the ELN there is much more violence and disorder.
I recounted how I had received a message that our boys' killers want to talk to me in Ibague jail, and how I am interested in talking to them as one wants to try and understand even if their actions are unthinkable, but as for forgive and forget, they can forget it. The prisoners all agreed heartily and said that there is only one solution for many people like our boys' murderers, and that is to kill them.
At one point I said that it seemed unfair to me that so much fuss was made over
the three Irishmen, they had so much help from the radical lawyers' collective,
whereas Colombian prisoners .but I didn't get to finish my sentence, as I had
obviously pressed a button. They immediately said the leftwing lawyers who
helped them were wonderful and they were all very glad the Irishmen were now
free, BUT that the lawyers should have used the publicity of the case to
highlight the plight of prisoners and help the thousands of Colombians in jail
instead of just getting famous off the case of the Irish Three. I have offered
to mediate in any way I can with the Lawyers' Collective and will be going to
see them to take a letter of complaint from the prisoners.
October 23rd: I have just come back from the Moon garden, which is finally beginning to resemble a real garden with beds and little plants, all sprouted from the vegetable waste we collected. The women find a lot of free food when we go through the refuse. They have become compost devotees and have made a big pile of compost while I've been away by going to the local veg. shops. When they showed me their work, I felt like a mum whose kid just took its first step.
It was, as always, a heart-warming experience to work with them, but I am in a kind of personal nightmare that was triggered off by getting to know these people and seeing how they live. It is to do with how much 'poverty' is intellectual, emotional, spiritual and not much to do with the material at all. It is to do with people not seeing what is around them, living in tiny houses when they are surrounded by piles of unused bricks, not noticing all the compostable matter that gets dumped daily, and all the other useful gear that gets chucked out.
October 27th: I went compost-making from 10 a.m. to 4.0 p.m. We moved a really big mountain of vegetable waste from where the lorry dumps it, into a little enclosure, laid it out in long deep rows and covered it with earth. This week we'll get more sawdust, horse-poo and more earth and then wait and see what comes up. The first beds we made are already covered with beans, peas, potatoes, tomatoes, tree tomatoes, Cape gooseberries, lulos (a delicious South American fruit that grows on a large very prickly plant), cucumbers, pumpkins and various other unidentified growing objects. It's an interesting way to garden.
I worked with four sisters and their mother. She is 60, her husband 61, but they are pure Indians and so look like 40 year olds. I was very lucky to have them as my first work group as they are quite amazingly enthusiastic and hard-working. Today they said they would like to make bulk compost-making their full-time work and are hoping to get enough veg. growing to be able to sell some, and two local shops say they will help.
I was told today that the main Bogota rubbish site has a maximum of three years to go before it is full and unusable. Yet the private contractors who collect the rubbish and park grass-cuttings still put off seeing me about taking their rubbish up to the Moon gardens - they are against anything that reduces the volume of 'rubbish' as they are paid according to bulk.
The high point of the day was the soup, it was vegetarian and was made out of chucked-out market veg., there was masses of it and we fed half the neighbourhood. I am not allowed to say it is made of recycled veg. though - these women are proud about the wrong kinds of things sometimes.
October 28th: I went today with a group from the Education Dept. of the office of the Mayor of Bogota and from the Botanical Gardens who invited me to look at various 'gardening' projects, as they want me to speak to a meeting of school-teachers with the object of attempting to make composting and vegetable gardening an essential part of the school curriculum. But oh! the places we visited, you would all die seeing them, I nearly did, especially the first one which was a roof-top 'garden' with rabbits in plastic cages, a lone guinea pig, no greens, a well-meaning, very poor man who has done it all with recycled materials, plants suffering in plastic bottles, worms suffering in boxes, everyone totally impressed, me totally depressed and wanting to run a mile. I couldn't possibly criticize, the owner was humble, he knew me from other meetings, everyone was waiting for my opinion, there were several people from poor areas there wanting to learn. I made some remarks about how much work he'd done and how wonderful that all his plants go to seed so quickly as seed-gathering is so important, sorry, yes, I'm a hypocrite. Luckily I then got drawn into a different subject. Later I got the nice humble owner on his own and said what I could about the rabbits and the lonely guinea pig. I didn't know how to begin regarding the cruelty being done to the broccoli and lettuce plants..
Nov. 6th: I am delighted with how enthusiastic the women at the Moon garden are. We spent today down around the local market, picking up vegetable refuse, loading a huge lorry with sawdust and horse-poo - and firewood, which lots of the women use for cooking. The lorry they hired got stuck on a hill and caused a traffic jam which made me very nervous, but in spite of this, we worked till dark and now the men have got enthusiastic too and some kids also say they want to make a garden.
There is a peasants' union called 'Fensuagro' which was started by the communist party and their main angle on agriculture is towards power through self-sufficiency and using organic methods to become independent of the chemical companies. They organized a peasants' market which took over the big modern Plaza de Bolivar yesterday - there were about 30 stalls selling organic veg., honey and quinoa, and they were all sold out by mid-afternoon. They intend to carry on establishing these markets all over Bogota to show people that the countryside is not a problem as this government would have them believe, but the solution to most problems. It is also a protest against big business and against the slant of the Mayor's anti-hunger programmes which are mainly based on hand-outs instead of real solutions. In typical Colombian paradoxical style, Lucho, the leftwing Mayor of Bogota, himself supports the markets.
I went to a meeting with the Director of the city administration dept. that deals with rubbish collection. I was somewhat blown over by the positive reception I got as I was expecting a busy VIP behind a desk going through the motions of helping me just to get rid of me. But I was met by a lovely humble man who got his whole team together, plus herb tea and biscuits, to listen to me and see how they could help. I felt a bit like I had been promoted to being the unofficial Minister for Rubbish. They have promised to deliver grass cuttings and market debris from the city and say they are coming to visit the Moon next week..
10th November: Today I gave a talk to about 50 school teachers on compost making! There is really interest here these days in making gardens and a few schools are making kids eat healthy food and they say that the kids' behaviour changes a lot when they eat greens! I talked about how kids have forgotten how to work and that all this 'Children's Rights' stuff has gone too far and kids are growing up useless. There was enormous agreement on this. One teacher said that kids used to learn to work alongside their parents and now all that connection has been destroyed and capitalism says that to work, you have to study first, but study makes you useless at working.
At this meeting were two really nice revolutionary women who were there at the time I visited the rooftop garden when I was appalled at the animal 'torture chambers'. I had time to really talk to them calmly and firmly about the rabbits and guinea pigs being held in solitary confinement in conditions akin to Guantanamo and said how is that an alternative if we just imitate industrial farming on a small scale. They were a bit put out at first but then they asked me to help to design a better system.
December 16th: I went up to the Moon garden on my return from the San Jose gathering in Northern Colombia, feeling snowed under by all the horrors I'd heard during my time there. And I arrived to a wonderful surprise. The women have enlarged the garden, making it about three times as big as it was by fencing in another big flat area. They made beds and compost piles inside little brick walls (no shortage of bricks from the old kilns) - lots of them, as they got loads of compostable waste while I was away and were really pleased with themselves. Cristina who used to live with us had worked a full day with them when they went to various plazas with a borrowed lorry to collect and sort waste. And all of this was achieved in spite of the promises from government departments not materializing. I wrote a letter of complaint to the people who had promised to organize delivery of grass cuttings and pre-sorted market rubbish for us. The women said, 'see, we told you so, that's what they are like.' I love these women, but sometimes worry that I have stumbled upon the best possible group of women in all of Bogota to work with and it can only go downhill from here!
Xmas Finale, Dec. 24th: I got two bossy phone calls, one from our lawyer friend Miriam, the other from Nubia, the Moon garden social worker, telling me I had to attend a Xmas party NOW. I was knackered but I went as they said they were waiting for me and it was really important. When I got to the community hall, it was packed with people, about 400 adults and their kids and as soon as I entered, totally scruffy as usual, Nubia took the mike and said something like: 'And it's all thanks to our friend Anne who has just arrived,' and everyone stood up and clapped madly.
You might think this is every Leo's dream and I would have thought so too, till it happened. But I only felt utterly confused and embarrassed as I hadn't a clue who 390 of the 400 people were or what I was being clapped for. Then I saw Miriam and two of her mates up on the stage, surrounded by a mini-Everest of Xmas presents and Nubia, after I asked her what the hell was going on, told me that the local people wanted to thank me for bringing them so many good things . I got hugged by half a million people I don't know and then dragged into a present-giving nightmare. I hated it. However I had to act really grateful to my kind-hearted friend Miriam and her posh friends for getting mountains of good quality clothes and shoes paid for from the money laundering carried out by the State Attorney's Office (!!), the US Embassy (!!!) and the President's office (!!!!!). My political reputation is shot in that barrio, all the gear was transported in posh cars from these institutions and I don't remember if it was the chauffeur from the State Attorney's office or the US Embassy who drove me home, as I was too far gone by then.
I hated it all, especially the 'charity' thing - I find it really insulting that they make a big deal out of giving people a few presents; the stupid carry-on lasted for hours. Then a male social worker tried to make everyone pray before giving out the presents, so I heckled him all the time saying: 'Presents now! Presents now!' and made everyone - except him - laugh.
And thus endeth this year's attempt to teach people recycling and
self-reliance..
As we are an entirely unfunded group, our work would be quite impossible without
the generosity of donors such as these. In this Green Letter, we have not dwelt
upon the rural side of our community work in Southern Colombia, which in fact is
the basis of how we live and the source of all the experience we are able to
pass on to others. Our farm life involves daily interaction with the
surrounding Indian and peasant communities who know they are able to come to us
at any time to request seeds to help them produce food for their families.
However, often we have run out of seeds, so this very large donation from North
America is like manna from heaven and we will see to it that what we are sent
reaches the widest possible number of recipients. We send a huge thankyou to
our benefactors.
Jenny James, Ned Addis, Anne Barr, and all at: Atlantis Ecological Community,
Colombia